Wordsmiths

One morning, from another room in the house I heard one of my sons say to another, "I actually like your outfit today." It was almost a compliment, but was actually a put-down. I could hear in his voice when he made the decision to say that one word, even though he might have started with every intention of complimenting his brother. Another of our sons went through a phase where he said many hurtful things to the members of our family, prefacing each one by saying, "No offense, but..." I'm sure he was thinking that this softened the blow of his words, when in fact it did not.

Words are powerful.

Everyone knows the difference between a sincere compliment—worded thoughtfully and carefully to mean something to you, individually—and a run-of-the-mill compliment that leaves you feeling nothing, and may even leave you feeling less competent than you did before receiving the compliment. The difference between the two is felt, not seen, but can change your life (or at least that relationship) more quickly than anything else.

Crafting just the right words and creating just the right sentences for the scene we are writing is one of the biggest challenges for an author. You feel it as a reader, don't you, wondering how the author will handle that much-anticipated scene? And then when you read it, they either exceed your expectations, meet them, or fall sadly short. If they exceed your expectations, it is highly likely that you will reread that scene again and again, never tiring of it. If they fall sadly short, you may never pick up the book again. This pressure is intense—to tell just enough of the details that the reader will get the picture of the scene in their heads, but to leave just enough unsaid that the reader's imagination can take over and personalize it to mean something to them—and can be crippling. This is why so many authors say it is important to just get words down on paper. Get over the hurdle of making every word the perfect one. Get the words down, and out of your head. Then you can start going back over them and revise, rewrite, rethink, redo. But if the words are never there in the first place, none of that is possible.

So, back to compliments. Authors have the advantage. They get to make as many drafts as they have the energy for, before their words meet their readers' eyes. They don't need to be a Mozart, with hardly a rewrite or blot on his manuscripts. They can be like Brahms, who struggled, cursed, threw out, crossed out, and nearly despaired of publishing a single composition. But his music is filled with his emotions, and draws them out in his listeners. Maybe it wouldn't impact our souls so much if his struggle hadn't been so great.

Happy Wordsmithing!

Rachael